ARCHIVED HERE: http://archive.is/hI8xw
Prestigious
Citations Scores can be had by Publishing Busted Bullony.
I’m currently
reading Sam Arbesman’s excellent book The Half-Life of Facts, a book that I was
only aware of after receiving an email from Sam to let me know his book
supported a myth that he had only learned was a myth - rather than a science
knowledge fact about bad science - after going into print. The myth is the one
that Steven Strogatz mentions as though it is a veracious science knowledge
fact in the promotional blurbs on the dust jacket of Sam’s book and you'll find
it wrongly disseminated again by Sam himself at pages 83 and 84 of this
excellent book. The myth is the widely believed Spinach Popeye Iron Decimal
Error Story (SPIDES). And Sam is in an excellent company of respected skeptical
scientists and other scholars who have been weirdly suckered by the SPIDES. You
can read my Amazon review of the Half-life of facts here.
Sam blogged
on his Wired science blog to set the record
straight and added the mythbusting he had missed in the Errata and updates web page for this book. His
own immediate admission of his human error in fact proves the central thesis of
this excellent book. To my mind anyone who responds that diligently to what
must have been a cringe-worthy "Oh doh!" moment is a scientist whose
work is worth following. I'd like to thank Sam for the virtual handshake - he's
a much bigger man the little English criminology professor who went into email
ballistic bullying and threatening mode when I recently busted the myth he
created in my own field of criminology. Moreover, the ranting mythbusted
professor had been asked to peer review the very paper I wrote that busted his
myth by the very prestigious criminology journal that I sent it to. This was a
clear and highly unethical breach of its publisher's promise that all peer
reviews are (a) anonymous and (b) must not have a conflict of interest. But
that’s another story for another day.
Interestingly,
academic careers can be built on publishing claptrap as veracious knowledge,
even after the claptrap has been mythbusted. And if particular claptrap is
heavily cited by superior academics for that very reason the publisher of the
claptrap gets rewarded by a high citations score!
Arbesman (p 17.),
who to my mind is such a superior academic, writes about the significance
attached to the h-index of the number of times an author’s work has been
published. As he explains: “if you have an h-index score of 45, it means you
have 45 articles that have been cited at least forty five times (though you
have likely published many more articles that have been cited fewer times)”.
I’m intrigued as an academic criminologist in search of a chair that my own
h-index score of 9 will, as soon as I get one more citation on any one of a
couple of papers that have so far been cited nine times, be more than twice as
high as that of the average professor of social sciences – at least according to experts at the London School of
Economics.
h-index scores by the London School
of Economics
So, I suppose, it’s
probably a good idea for me to add my h-score and Google scholar link to my CV.
You can see my h-index score here.
Readers of Best
Thinking may be intrigued to know that Google Scholar’s h-index does not yet
appear (I believe) to include Best Thinking articles in its scoring. Yet the
busting of the spinach myth here on Best Thinking is the Best Thinking
article that Arbesman mentions in his Wired.com blog and in the
Errata and updates page for his book. Surely then, Google Scholar needs to
polish up its act in this regard if is to contribute to the shortening of the
full life of myths. That said, if there is a message to be had from this blog,
it’s this: When going into print, first Google your ‘known’ facts lest they be
already consigned to the mythbin.
For me, the
fascinating question that remains outside of the realms of how knowledge
expands at exponential rates is why is the SPIDES myth is so widely believed
and decimated by skeptical scholars? Perhaps we need to study the whole life of
myths believed by experts, particularly those believed by credulous skeptics
who weirdly fail to check the underlying premises and facts for widely believed
claims? And that, dear readers is the core theme of the book I am currently
writing and intend publishing (if they’ll have me) as a Thinker Media e-book
here on Best Thinking. The book is on the Spinach Myth. My hope is that it will
be picked up by Google Scholar and added to my h-index score in the same way
that those who continue to credulously disseminate myths as veracious truths
benefit from writing claptrap. Only time will tell. And before then, I've got
to finish it.
Postscript 19th
November 2012:
Unfortunately,
after finishing The Half Life of Facts, I have to report that Arbesman
credulously propagates yet another Supermyth. Namely, the Semmelweis
Myth. You can read about it here .
Reference
Arbesman, S. (2012)
The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has An Expiration Date. London.
Current. Penguin Books. http://www.amazon.com/The-Half-life-Facts-Everything-Expiration/dp/159184472X
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